Topological reconstruction and compactification theory

Abstract

This thesis investigates the topological reconstruction problem, which is inspired by the reconstruction conjecture in graph theory. We ask how much information about a topological space can be recovered from the homeomorphism types of its point-complement subspaces. If the whole space can be recovered up to homeomorphism, it is called reconstructible. In the first part of this thesis, we investigate under which conditions compact spaces are reconstructible. It is shown that a non-reconstructible compact metrizable space must contain a dense collection of 1-point components. In particular, all metrizable continua are reconstructible. On the other hand, any first-countable compactification of countably many copies of the Cantor set is non-reconstructible, and so are all compact metrizable h-homogeneous spaces with a dense collection of 1-point components. We then investigate which non-compact locally compact spaces are reconstructible. Our main technical result is a framework for the reconstruction of spaces with a maximal finite compactification. We show that Euclidean spaces ℝn and all ordinals are reconstructible. In the second part, we show that it is independent of ZFC whether the Stone-Čech remainder of the integers, ω*, is reconstructible. Further, the property of being a normal space is consistently non-reconstructible. Under the Continuum Hypothesis, the compact Hausdorff space ω* has a non-normal reconstruction, namely the space ω*\{p} for a P-point p of ω*. More generally, the existence of an uncountable cardinal κ satisfying κ = κ<κ implies that there is a normal space with a non-normal reconstruction. The final chapter discusses the Stone-Čech compactification and the Stone-Čech remainder of spaces ω*\{x}. Assuming the Continuum Hypothesis, we show that for every point x of ω*, the Stone-Čech remainder of ω*{x} is an ω2-Parovičenko space of cardinality 22c which admits a family of 2c disjoint open sets. This implies that under 2c = ω2, the Stone-Čech remainders of ω*\{x} are all homeomorphic, regardless of which point x gets removed.This thesis is not currently available on ORA